Vital Social Skills and Life Skills Training for your Special Needs Students

Our PeopleSmart Program will help teach your students the essential social skills and life skills directly related to friendship and trust.

At James Stanfield Company, we want students to have friends to enrich their lives, make them feel connected, and help them in times of need. One of the key thrusts of the PeopleSmart social skills lessons is the distinction it emphasizes between friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Developing and distinguishing friendships is important in early childhood skills in special education.

Students are challenged to rethink the common tendency to refer to anyone they know as a friend. Your special needs students will learn that friends are people who look out for their best interests and who genuinely care about their well-being, acquaintances are simply people they have met, recognize, or interacted with from time to time, and strangers are people who they have never met and don’t know at all. In PeopleSmart, your students will learn the NotSmart and the PeopleSmart ways to meet people, make friends, develop long-term relationships and avoid being taken advantage of by “friendly” acquaintances and strangers.

The distinction between friends and acquaintances is critical, especially for a population that has a history in our culture of being easily taken advantage of and exploited. By being aware of these distinctions, your special needs students will be able to avoid exploitation and maintain healthy friendships.pn

The PeopleSmart Social Skills Series is composed of 6 parts:

Part 1: How to Meet People

Students will learn 10 ways to meet people with common interests and the specific do’s and don’ts for projecting an “I’m Interested” attitude.

Part 2: How to Turn An Acquaintance Into A Friend

Your students will learn what people do to go beyond being an acquaintance and become a real friend.

Part 3: How to Deepen a Friendship

This part will teach kids the kinds of friends you can trust with your most intimate thoughts and feelings and who you can count on to stand by you in bad times.

Students will learn to recognize and avoid potentially exploitative strangers and understand the importance of trusting warning feelings.

Part 6: How to be Attractive to the Opposite Sex:

A discussion on what behaviors and attitudes support opposite-sex/romantic relationships.

Also included in our PeopleSmart program are 2 Teacher’s Guides, with various lesson plans and activities for you and your special education students. These act as great additional resources for social skills and life skills training. Our PeopleSmart program is meant to not only act as a guide for social skills between people, but to also emphasize vital life skills needed as students meet new people throughout their lives.